I was in Melbourne yesterday for an all day workshop. I flew over on the first plane from Adelaide and then caught the last plane back from Melbourne. I relaxed at home late in the evening with this DVD of a live show from Bruce Springsteen's The Rising tour:

I'd been listening to The Essential Bruce Springsteen---it shows Springsteen to be a skilled melodist. So I was interested in hearing late Springsteen live.

Many hold that rock music is transcendent because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde, and for many fans Springsteen stands for rock authenticity. Jon Landau's words capture this:

Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theatre, I saw my rock'n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.

This is the first time a Springsteen concert has been released in its entirety. It is a big loud rock and roll concert that is full of energy. The DVD designed to be watched on large screen,with the DVD player wired through the stereo, full surround sound and the volume turned up. It's a rock concert. The enthusiastic crowd gives a live feel to the DVD and they are comfortable with the "Boss" persona of white, working-class authenticity and the Americana of the blue-collar, rock 'n' roll naif.

Though the concert is impressively energetic, enthusiastic, big and loud, musically speaking, it disappoints. The mix was often poor on the commercially accessible rock material, the band sounded murky in the early stages, and the big songs---the tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs--- often sounded inferior to the originals and much the same. The appropriation of Phil Spector's production values into epic rock surroundings becomes bombastic arena rock. The sound was much crisper on the more somber folk-oriented works. The Rising tour is more shadow than substance. It just isn’t 1984 any more.

Springsteen has yet to release an official live album that is worthy of his place in rock history and one that is equivalent to Live Dead, The Who Live at Leeds or The Allman Brothers Live at Fillimore East Kevin Cherry says that the best documents of his career continue to be the tapes of the many radio broadcasts on the 1978 tour. I'm going back to listen to Born to Run from 1975.

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